Mercury is a known neurotoxin that is particularly harmful to children and unborn fetuses. Consumption of contaminated fish is one major route of mercury exposure. This laboratory experiment gives students an opportunity to measure mercury concentrations in store-bought seafood and compare the results to suggested exposure limits. The U.S.…

A computational experiment that investigates single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) has been developed and employed in an upper-level undergraduate physical chemistry laboratory course. Computations were carried out to determine the electronic structure, radial breathing modes, and the influence of the nanotube's diameter on the…

Children can acquire generic knowledge by sharing in pretend play with more knowledgeable partners. We report 3 experiments in which we investigated how this learning occurs-how children draw generalizations from pretense, and whether they resist doing so for pretense that is unrealistic. In all experiments, preschoolers watched pretend scenarios…

Every instructor should know some easy examples of anharmonic oscillations. The rocking of an empty wine bottle or a slender beer glass is one of those: The angle is not a sinusoidal function of time and the period is not independent of the amplitude, not even for small amplitudes. But care has to be taken that the glass does not slip or rotate…

We investigated the effect of co-presenting training items during supervised classification learning of novel relational categories. Strong evidence exists that comparison induces a structural alignment process that renders common relational structure more salient. We hypothesized that comparisons between exemplars would facilitate learning and…

Electrochemistry is a significant area of analytical chemistry encompassing electrical measurements of chemical systems. The applications associated with electrochemistry appear in many aspects of everyday life: explaining how batteries work, how the human nervous system functions, and how metal corrosion occurs. The most common electrochemical…

In April 1820, Hans Christian Ørsted noticed that the needle of a nearby compass deflected briefly from magnetic north each time the electric current of the battery he was using for an unrelated experiment was turned on or off. Upon further investigation, he showed that an electric current flowing through a wire produces a magnetic field. In 1831…

In nature, water drops can have a large variety of sizes and shapes. Small droplets with diameters of the order of 5 to 10 µm are present in fog and clouds. This is not sufficiently large for gravity to dominate their behavior. In contrast, raindrops typically have sizes of the order of 1 mm, with observed maximum sizes in nature of around 5 mm in…

In a recent paper, Zable described an experiment with a near-spherical balloon filled with impure helium. Measuring the temperature and the pressure inside and outside the balloon, the lift of the balloon, and the mass of the balloon materials, he described how to use the ideal gas laws and Archimedes' principal to compute the average molecular…

With real particle collision data available on the web, the amazing dynamics of the fundamental particles of the standard model can be explored in classrooms. Complementing the events from the ATLAS experiment with animations of the fundamental processes on the quark and gluon level makes it possible to better understand the invisible world of…

Perception studies have shown similarities between humans and other animals in a wide array of language-related processes. However, the components of language that make it uniquely human have not been fully identified. Here we show that nonhuman animals extract rules over speech sequences that are difficult for humans. Specifically, animals easily…

The current study investigates the relative extent to which information utility and planning efficiency guide information-sampling strategies in a classification task. Prior research has pointed to the importance of probability gain, the degree to which sampling a feature reduces the chance of error, in contexts where participants are restricted…

Perceptual experiences in one modality are often dependent on activity from other sensory modalities. These cross-modal correspondences are also evident in language. Adults and toddlers spontaneously and consistently map particular words (e.g., "kiki") to particular shapes (e.g., angular shapes). However, the origins of these systematic mappings…

At a large, diverse, hispanic-serving, master's-granting university, the Alma Project was created to support the rich connections of life experiences of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students that come from racially diverse backgrounds through reflective journaling. Utilizing frameworks in ethnic studies and social…

The purpose of this study was to design a one-hour brain dissection protocol for a medical neuroscience course and evaluate the short and long-term effects of its implementation on medical students. First-year medical students (n = 166) participated in a brain dissection activity that included dissection of the basal nuclei and associated deep…